Hello friends! I won't get many opportunities to link a classic rock music video to my blog post for a legitimate reason, so I am going to take full advantage of this one (even if the song is about a car instead of the actual country...):
| I am currently writing this post in Panama! I'll be down here from August 28th - September 20th (see rough schedule below), and I fully expect you to hear this song in your head every time I make a post about my adventures in Central America :) |
I came down to Panama as part of a collaborative effort with Aaron O'Dea and Thomas Wake that's been based off of their 2014 Proceedings of the Royal Society B paper Evidence of size-selective evolution in the fighting conch from prehistoric subsistence harvesting. tl;dr - conch in Bocas del Toro are much smaller than they used to be because people have been eating lots of the big ones for a very long time. |
I was fortunate enough to be awarded a Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) Short-Term Fellowship to come down to Panama and collect some materials for my research. I'll also be giving a seminar talk towards the end of my visit about the review paper we published earlier this year. It'll be live streamed here if you'd like to watch :)
I'm also going to take a few days to do touristy things in/around Panama City with my Momma (if she ever chooses her flight!). If you've ever visited before, please give us suggestions! We'll go see the canal (obvs) and maybe island hop a bit - as long as Momma gets her day on a beach then we're not too picky about activities haha. I'm looking forward to sharing my exploits with you :) Cheers!